Evening Stars Chapter 8
Translated by Q the Panda (ko-fi)
Chapter 8
Drowsiness was contagious.
It didn't matter what the transmission medium was. It could spread through the air or even through the internet cables.
Fang Shiyou only realized upon coming closer that those were tears brought on by drowsiness. Just then, in the video meeting, the dog behind Teacher Su Yu stretched lazily in its bed, smacked its lips twice, and rolled over to sleep again. Xu Nanheng finally couldn't hold it in anymore. He tilted his head out of the camera frame and yawned.
When he looked up, his bleary, tear-filled eyes met Fang Shiyou's gaze. Fang Shiyou sighed soundlessly, gave him a look that said ‘hang in there,’ then unplugged his phone charger from the power strip and walked out.
Xu Nanheng was utterly exhausted. The moment the meeting ended, he shut his laptop and lay down on the desk. He told himself he'd just rest for five minutes to clear his head. Besides, he thought, this position would soon make his arms sore enough to wake him up.
Five minutes was a magical span of time. It could be nothing more than a literal five minutes, roughly the length of a song. Or it could be a kind of time warp, and by the time one woke again, the world had already changed beyond recognition.
When Xu Nanheng woke up again, he was disoriented. The first thing he saw upon opening his eyes was a strange room. After a moment's pause, he saw his laptop by his hand. Slowly, he lifted his gaze and remembered that he was in Fang Shiyou's consultation room.
He sat up straight, and a blanket slipped from his shoulders to his waist. Turning around, he picked it up. It was a blue coral fleece blanket, and when he lifted it higher, he saw Doraemon printed on it.
Xu Nanheng blinked and flipped open his laptop. The time read 1:55 PM.
Well, those five minutes turned into three hours.
Xu Nanheng let out a breath, rubbed his face with both hands, then patted it a few times until he felt mostly awake. He picked up his phone beside the laptop and unlocked it. Dr. Fang had sent a WeChat message: ‘Text me when you wake up.’
Xu Nanheng: ‘Awake.’
His reply felt a bit stiff, so he added a dazed cat emoji.
He was awake, but still groggy.
Just as he turned his head, the door opened from the outside. Fang Shiyou walked in holding a lunchbox. Xu Nanheng felt a little embarrassed and gave him an awkward smile. “I-I fell asleep by accident……”
“It's fine.” Fang Shiyou closed the door and sat down on the stool by the desk, the one usually reserved for patients. His lunchbox was made of glass, and when he opened it, there were two meat pies inside, still visibly hot, with beads of steam clinging to the edges.
“I saw you were sleeping soundly, so I didn't wake you. These are the leftover beef pies from yesterday. I had two for lunch and kept two warm in the steamer for you,” Fang Shiyou said, opening the lunchbox. “Go on, eat.”
When Xu Nanheng didn't move, Fang Shiyou added, “Teacher Xu, this is real Tibetan yak beef, minced and hand-whipped, wrapped in a flaky pastry crust.”
“No, no!” Xu Nanheng said quickly, realizing what he menat. “I'm not being picky, I just…… feel embarrassed.”
Fang Shiyou let out a small laugh. “I know. I was just teasing you.”
“Please don't tease me anymore.”
“Go ahead and eat. I didn't bring chopsticks. They're all in the sterilizer. Just use your hands.”
Xu Nanheng folded the blanket and hung it over the back of the chair, getting ready to stand. “Then I'll go wash my hands.”
“Here.” Fang Shiyou pushed a bottle of hand sanitizer across the desk toward him.
Xu Nanheng looked like he could cry. The faded ‘Surgical Clinic’ sign on the wall suddenly felt more like a ‘Pediatric Clinic.’ He pressed the pump twice, catching the sanitizer in his palm, and began to rub.
Fang Shiyou: “Between the fingers too.”
Xu Nanheng: “……Are you sure you're not a pediatrician?”
Fang Shiyou: “Not yet that noble.”
Xu Nanheng couldn't help but laugh.
Fang Shiyou stood up, hands in his pockets. “After you eat, just wash the lunchbox in the cafeteria and leave it on the desk. I have to head back to the county hospital. My rotation at this small hospital ends this week.”
“Huh?” Xu Nanheng looked up at him. “You're leaving already?”
“Yeah.” Fang Shiyou nodded. “I've got a surgery scheduled at the big hospital on Monday. I'll head over today, do morning rounds tomorrow, then go straight to the operating room.”
When Xu Nanheng heard he was leaving, he set the meat pie down and stood up as well. So Fang Shiyou could have left earlier, but he'd just waited for him to wake up so he could bring the pies over before leaving.
“Then…… then should I walk you out?” Xu Nanheng finally managed to say after racking his brain.
Fang Shiyou looked at him. “Just finish your food. I think I can still find my way out.”
“I just feel like I've really inconvenienced you,” Xu Nanheng said, a little embarrassed.
“It's fine. You've just arrived, and I was simply lending a hand. It's no big deal,” Fang Shiyou said. “I should be back in about two weeks. Do you need me to bring you anything?”
Xu Nanheng let out a “Hm?”
Fang Shiyou understood right away. It was the same a few days ago at the county market, when he felt that simply buying a mattress would be enough.
As expected.
Xu Nanheng said, “Didn't I just haul back a whole truckload of stuff? I don't need anything else. That crate of Coke alone will last me two weeks.”
“Alright.” Fang Shiyou didn't try to persuade him further. “How about I'll send you the county hospital address later, then if you want to order anything online, just have it delivered there, under my name and number. I'll bring it back for you when I return.”
“That's really not necessary,” Xu Nanheng said. “You've already done enough, Dr. Fang.”
Fang Shiyou smiled. “We'll keep in touch on WeChat. I'll get going now.”
The air in the Southern Tibet was clear and crisp. After eating, Xu Nanheng washed his bowl and stepped out of the hospital. For the first time, he stopped to take in the place where he'd been assigned to teach.
The mountains here were part of a vast range. Paving mountain roads was not an impossible feat. After all, even the 108 bends of the Pamir Plateau had been paved into a highway. But here, the tightly packed peaks and complex, narrow paths made excavation exceptionally difficult. This isolation, in turn, stifled the region's economic development.
Still…… it was truly beautiful here.
It could rival any of those ‘places you must visit in your lifetime’ that Xu Nanheng had seen on travel apps. But the world was full of such uncelebrated beauty. Good wine does not fear a deep alley? Well, at least that deep alley was a place you could walk into on your own two feet. Out here, even a four-wheel-drive Mercedes-Benz would have trouble getting through.
(T/N: the idiom means ‘if you make good wine, people will find you, no matter where you are’)
Xu Nanheng was tall and lean but not frail. His handsome features exude a strong scholarly air. Beneath his thick brows were bright eyes inherited from his mother. His lashes were long and full. When he was young, his eyes had been round, like a porcelain doll's. Now, grown up, he'd shed that childish cuteness and turned into a young man with quiet poise and striking grace.
“Huh?”
A voice called out, neither too far nor too close.
Xu Nanheng's gaze had been fixed on the distant ridgeline. He snapped back to himself and looked to the side. A young girl stood there, her hair tied in a low ponytail. She appeared to be a local, and like many people living in the plateau region, her skin was tanned and her cheeks were ruddy.
The girl, perhaps a bit shy around strangers, stopped in her tracks and cautiously stared back at Xu Nanheng. There was no real reason for confrontation, yet somehow, they ended up standing that way.
Both were equally cautious. The girl looked about fourteen or fifteen, small in stature, dressed in a tracksuit.
Xu Nanheng could vaguely sense that this girl might be one of his students on Monday. He actually wanted to say hello, but the girl looked at him as if he were a plateau wolf that had strayed into the village.
She was wary, yet like him, there was hesitation in her eyes. That hesitation probably came from hearing that a volunteer teacher had arrived in the village. Strangers were rare here, especially ones so obviously from the ‘outside.’
Soon, a nurse walked out of the hospital yard carrying something toward an ambulance. The girl called out to the nurse. Since Xu Nanheng couldn't understand it, he walked away.
Monday, the opening ceremony.
There were sixty-six students in total across the two classes. They stood on the open area of the front playground, while the teachers gathered beneath the national flag. Xu Nanheng stood beside Teacher Tsering, and on his other side was the school principal, Teacher Tsomo.
The night before, Xu Nanheng had parked his car at the hospital, in Dr. Fang's parking spot. Good thing Fang Shiyou had already moved his car. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been enough space in the front yard for everyone to stand.
All the students could speak Mandarin, some fluently, others with a bit of a stutter. Their ages varied, as Xu Nanheng had already seen from the roster. The youngest was a 13-year-old girl named Tashi Dolkar, while the oldest was 17, a Han Chinese named Zhou Yang.
The principal enthusiastically and theatrically introduced Teacher Xu Nanheng to the students, particularly emphasizing that Teacher Xu was from Beijing. The students let out a collective “Ohhhh” and broke into sincere applause, which left him feeling terribly embarrassed and wishing that part would end quickly.
Then the principal leaned over and quietly asked Xu Nanheng if they should all dance together to liven things up. Xu Nanheng's head snapped back as if jolted by a live wire. “Please, absolutely not.”
After the opening ceremony, the teachers held a meeting with Xu Nanheng in the third-floor office. They were quite apologetic, repeatedly offering their apologies to Xu Nanheng. A few days ago, a student from a nearby village had been injured while doing farm work. With the child's parents working away from home, only the elderly and the young ones were left at home, so the teachers had gone together to help with farming, taking the student to the hospital, and staying by the bedside.
Xu Nanheng naturally said it was fine. He was an adult, after all. He didn't need anyone running around to take care of him.
In total, including Xu Nanheng, the school had one principal, five teachers, and two classes with just over sixty students. When he received the class roster, the administrators also warned him that the students' academic levels were generally quite basic. They couldn't compare to their counterparts in Beijing, so he should be mentally prepared.
And just like that, the volunteer teaching post in the Tibetan area successfully started classes. Teacher Xu walked into the classroom with his teaching materials. This place was unlike Beijing, where high school blackboards were touch screens that allowed you to drag and manipulate solid geometry figures. Here, Xu Nanheng pulled out a stick of chalk and looked at the students before him.
“My surname is Xu. I'll be your math teacher.” When Xu Nanheng stood at the podium, his Mandarin was standard, without a Beijing accent or a lackadaisical tone. “Uh, since you're already in your final year of junior high, let's not waste time. We'll start class right away.”
During the three-thousand-kilometer drive from Beijing, Xu Nanheng had imagined how he would introduce himself once he arrived. He thought something brief would do, something like, ‘Hello everyone, my name is Xu Nanheng. I may be here as a volunteer teacher, but I hope we can get along……’ and so on.
But once he was actually standing there, Xu Nanheng felt that all those words would have been a waste of time.
He decided to treat this like any ordinary classroom. Standing behind the slightly worn podium, he looked at the students and reminded himself silently, ‘I'm here to teach, not to spread love. What they need are grades, not comfort.’
They needed to test out of this village to the county, to Shannan, maybe even to Lhasa. Xu Nanheng wet his lips slightly and said, “Open your books. We'll start with Chapter 1.”
WeChat, Volunteer Teachers Group.
[Tan Xi: @Xu Nanheng, Teacher Xu, first day of school, right? How's it going?]
Xu Nanheng's school opened the earliest. Teacher Tan was in Daliang Mountains, and their term wouldn't start until next week. It was half past seven in the evening when Xu Nanheng had just finished dinner in the school cafeteria.
The so-called cafeteria was a row of brick houses beside the playground. The principal did the cooking, and a few teachers helped with prep work. It was only when Xu Nanheng sat down to eat that he realized the teachers pitched in with tasks like chopping vegetables, washing utensils, and the like. He thought to himself that he should come earlier tomorrow to help out.
[Xu Nanheng: Not bad, actually. The students' level is a bit better than I expected.]
[Tan Xi: You must have set a pretty low expectation then. How about yourself? How do you feel about it?]
Myself…… Xu Nanheng walked up to the second floor, scrolling through his phone. Even after being here for days, he still had to climb the stairs slowly.
[Xu Nanheng: I just taught normally. Didn't treat them like poor kids.]
Another teacher joined the chat. [Dai Jimian: That's right. Don't carry that sense of pity. That would seem condescending and put pressure on the students. Just teach normally, handle the class as usual.]
Teacher Dai, having volunteered before, was the most experienced among them. Xu Nanheng agreed. It was the first day of school, and all the students were well-behaved. But since they were children of this age, it was normal for them to be a bit mischievous. They were probably just being extra good today.
So, Teacher Xu kept things formal and serious. Before the class ended, he assigned homework and told them to add ‘Graduating Class’ in parentheses after ‘Class 2’ on their exercise books, followed by their own names.
Class 2 (Graduating Class), [Student Name].
So sometimes, rituals weren't meaningless or empty gestures. People needed guidance, especially children, who were very sensitive. As Teacher Dai had said, if you pitied them, they would start to feel truly pitiful. That wouldn't do.
Lying back on the bed layered with thick mattresses, Teacher Xu decided to rest for a while before getting up to review the teaching materials and think about his plans. Not just teaching plans.
Suddenly, he had a flash of inspiration and sat up.
He opened WeChat and tapped on Dr. Fang's chat. The last message in their conversation was from Fang Shiyou, sending him the county hospital's address. Xu Nanheng had replied with a simple “OK.”
[Xu Nanheng: Dr. Fang, are you busy?]
He knew the man was a doctor, and that doctors replied when fate allowed, but Xu Nanheng still held his phone, waiting.
By coincidence, Fang Shiyou had just finished a consultation around that time.
[Fang Shiyou: Go ahead, Teacher Xu.]
Xu Nanheng pressed the voice message button and spoke directly: “Um…… when you have time, could you ask around in the county if anyone makes school uniforms? I want to order sixty-six sets of autumn uniforms, times two, so they can have one to wear and one to wash.”
After hearing it, Fang Shiyou froze for a moment.
Then, not long after, another voice message from Xu Nanheng came in. He tapped to listen.
“Oh, I'll pay for it myself. Later, I'll have the principal distribute them to the students under the school's name. Do you think that's appropriate?”
When Xu Nanheng spoke, his Beijing accent slipped back in. Having grown up with his grandfather, his youthful voice carried an old-timer's drawl, which was oddly endearing.
Actually, this was exactly what Fang Shiyou was thinking about when he paused. If the children knew the volunteer teacher was paying for the uniforms, the more sensitive ones would inevitably overthink it. But if the principal handed them out, it would become a genuine benefit from the school.
Fang Shiyou walked back to the doctors' office in the inpatient department, twisted open his thermos, and took a sip of water to moisten his throat before pressing the voice message button. “Sure thing. I'll ask my local colleagues, then go check it out this Sunday, and get back to you…… Hey, Teacher Xu, let's drop the formal ‘you,’ yeah? Feels exhausting.”
Xu Nanheng thought that made sense. But truthfully, he used the formal address partly because he saw Fang Shiyou as a kind of older-brother figure, and partly because he genuinely respected his profession.
He said, “Alright then, Dr. Fang. Let's just be friends. I don't have many friends, so you can count as one.”
Then he pressed the voice button again and added, “Oh, right, I parked my car in your spot yesterday. I forgot to tell you.”
Fang Shiyou replied: [Feel free to park there.]
[Then where are you parking when you get back?]
[I'm not driving. I'll just walk back.]
Xu Nanheng let out a laugh.